By Stuart Elliott
Madison Avenue, facing growing legislative threats to one of the advertising industry's most lucrative categories, is stepping up the fight to protect its freedom to pitch prescription drugs directly to consumers.
Drug companies, agencies and their media allies who have benefited handsomely from the flood of ads beat back one recent measure in the House of Representatives. But advocacy organizations on the other side of the issue vow to continue battling to limit or even eliminate such campaigns, and one senator has introduced legislation that would limit the pharmaceutical industry's tax deduction for such advertising.
The category of direct-to-consumer ads did not even exist until five years ago. Before 1997, broad curbs prevented pharmaceutical makers from mounting any significant efforts, and they aimed most of their spending directly at health care professionals.
But since the Food and Drug Administration loosened its strictures against those ads, primarily by making it much easier to promote drugs with commercials, the category has boomed. It has become an estimated $3 billion-a-year business for the media. That exceeds the amount spent annually to advertise many drugs sold over the counter like analgesics and vitamins, according to CMR, a division of Taylor Nelson Sofres that tracks ad spending.
The spending for the direct-to-consumer drug campaigns, which come complete with the traditional trappings of brand advertising like celebrity endorsers, jingles, free samples and slogans, also exceeds the yearly outlays in mainstay marketing categories like insurance and real estate, apparel and alcoholic beverages.
Agencies are anxious to keep that revenue flowing as they struggle to recover from the worst advertising recession in decades. They and their clients, the drug companies, are also eager to keep open a channel that has significantly stimulated demand and sales.
Indeed, in a survey last month by the Ipsos marketing research company, 25 percent of respondents said they had been prompted by direct-to-consumer ads to call or visit a doctor to discuss the product being advertised. Moreover, 15 percent of respondents reported requesting the very drug that was the subject of the ad.
That is one reason opponents castigate direct-to-consumer ads, decrying them as unfairly influencing important health care decisions about powerful medicines that ought not to be sold with the same sophisticated marketing ploys used to peddle movies, soft drinks or fast food.
"The stuff done to promote drugs works, and because it works, it's doing a disservice to the patient," said Sidney Wolfe, director for the health research group of Public Citizen, an advocacy organization in Washington. "The doctors are frequently as misled as the patients are," he added.
One doctor, J. Edward Hill - the new chairman of the American Medical Association in Chicago - offered another complaint. "We have no policy that opposes direct-to-consumer advertising, mainly because of freedom-of-speech issues," Dr. Hill said. "However, we do have some big concerns about advertising getting in the middle of the patient-physician relationship.
"It's sometimes even creating an adversarial relationship," he added, "when the patient insists on an advertised medicine but the doctor believes it's not the best or most effective medicine."
The agencies are being joined by lobbyists for media that would lose ad revenue if Congress tightened rules for direct-to-consumer ads. At one time, some magazine and newspaper publishers perceived television and radio as rivals for ad revenue from makers of prescription drugs, but the media are now working together.
New York Times July 12, 2002
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